Kingston ValueRAM 8GB

SCORE

PRICE £29 (£35 inc VAT) from cclonline.com

This ValueRAM memory lives up to its name – buy two of these 8GB sticks and you’ll only pay £70, making this set the cheapest “kit” here. (Note that our results are for two 8GB DIMMs.) The lower price necessitates compromise. This memory runs at 2,666MHz, which puts it a couple of steps behind everything else. The DIMM itself is plain, with no heatspreaders or LEDs.

Unsurprisingly, the Kingston’s performance is underwhelming too. In our image-editing test, its score of 186 is reasonable, but it fell behind all of its rivals in the tougher video-editing and multitasking benchmarks.

It offered a surprising turn of speed in Cinebench’s multicore test, but lagged behind most other kits in the other Cinebench run and in both Geekbench tests. Its 3DMark Fire Strike score of 24,846 is surprisingly quick, but in Tomb Raider its average frame rate of 144fps was poor.

The lesser clock speed meant that the Kingston’s theoretical benchmarks were slow. Its bandwidth results were several gigabytes-per-second behind anything else here, and its latency figure was poorer – so it takes longer for the memory to wake and begin processing information.

This ValueRAM is perfectly serviceable for mainstream gaming and computing, but it makes sense to spend a few pounds more on the Corsair Vengeance LPX.

8GB DIMM 2,666MHz DDR4 dual/quadchannel configuration 19-19-19 timings 1.2V voltage part number: KVR26N19S8/8

When buying memory, there are important rules of thumb to follow: make sure you’ve got the right capacity and channel arrangement, and buy the fastest kit you can afford. If you’re buying an AMD Ryzen processor, though, the company’s design process means memory speed is vital.

AMD builds Ryzen chips using modules with several CPU cores, with these modules packaged alongside each other to create multicore CPUs. This approach is beneficial: it brings AMD’s costs down, and it also means AMD can build high-end chips with more cores at a lower cost than Intel.

These blocks need to communicate, though, which requires an interconnect architecture called the Infinity Fabric (IF). This architecture doesn’t only connect CPU cores – it also handles PCIe traffic, south bridge data and SATA information. Your PC’s memory speed defines the speed of the IF– so faster memory means faster IF functionality.

AMD’s modular design means chips with more cores use more blocks – and more IF. Memory speed becomes even more important as the number of cores increases.

Intel builds processors differently, with a memory controller separated from the processing cores – so memory speed doesn’t have such an impact on other areas of operation. Differences in memory speeds only provide modest reductions and gains to performance, and applications will respond differently too. In short, Intel’s lack of an equivalent to IF means you’ve got greater scope for buying cheaper, slower memory – especially if you’re building a more affordable rig.

However, the IF means you need to pay closer attention to clock speeds on AMD builds, no matter their price. Take care here and you’ll get more performance out of your PC.